Bohemian Rhapsody

Still feeling too raw to write about the election. I don't think I have any particular insight to share. I suspect I'll have something to say before the inauguration.

I've been coping/escaping by diving back into Europa Universalis IV. For much of the time I was playing Hearts of Iron IV I found myself wishing that I was playing EU4 instead, so now I am!

This is my long-anticipated game focused on playing within the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE is probably the singular distinctive feature of the EU series of games, with really specific mechanics and a ton of flavor rooted in late-medieval and early-modern history. In my grand Portugal game I mostly just observed it from afar, except for the insanely exciting World War Zero campaign which may have been the highlight of a very long and very fun game.

That Portugal run ended when, in a bizarre turn of luck, I was crowned the Emperor of the HRE despite being way the heck over in Iberia. In that game, I helped the Catholic League keep Catholicism as the official faith of the Empire; but the HRE was overwhelmingly Protestant, so no major princes were eligible to be Emperor. The crown passed through a series of weak and tiny one-province minors, who would invariably get stomped when called to defend territory. It turns out that, in a "There's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball!" turn, nothing requires the Emperor to actually be a member of the Empire, and so, as an extremely well-liked and very powerful Catholic country, I got tagged in at the end.

Back to the present: I spent just a little while deciding which country to play as. Unlike EU3, where playing as a one-province or two-province minor can be a fun challenge, in EU4 it's a major slog, and larger countries are way better. The obvious answer was to play as Austria, the initial Emperor in 1444, but for some reason I shied away from that; I think it seemed a bit too obvious. I was more attracted to Bohemia, very roughly the modern-day Czech Republic. They're an Elector, so they can influence who becomes Emperor (including themselves); they're fairly large, not quite as big as Austria but bigger than most states; they're a Kingdom as opposed to a Duchy and get various bonuses as a result; they're on the eastern edge of the HRE, so they have options both for expanding inside of it and expanding outside; and over the years they've gotten a fair amount of additional content, including unique Missions, events, and even a related religion.

The religion might be the thing that intrigued me the most. Part of the "Emperor" DLC that I had previously picked up included content related to the Hussites, a sort of proto-Protestant reform sect that had emerged in Bohemia some years earlier; by 1444 it had been repressed, which in-game is represented by the official religion being Catholic but several provinces within the country, including the capital Prague, being Hussite.

I fired up the game and, as I do, immediately started work on converting those provinces back to Catholic. Politically, Bohemia starts off without a ruler: they had previously been in a personal union with Hungary, but that king died before the start of the game, so you're under a regency council. After a year or two, a new king is chosen, with pretty good stats - I think like 5/3/4 or something.

Some time after that an event fires about resolving the legacy of the Hussites. You can choose to suppress the faith, which boosts your missionary effectiveness at the cost of increased unrest; or you can continue to tolerate it, which increases, well, Tolerance of Heretics, and kicks off another event chain. I chose the first option to speed up conversions. But at the game went on, I wondered: Why? My Portugal game had been very Catholic-heavy, and that was all well and good, but since I was playing a whole new game, why not try out a different religion for a change?

For me, one of the hallmarks of a Paradox game is restarting several times at the beginning of a new campaign. In Stellaris I'll usually lock into the species I want to play as and my overall goals, and will play a few decades for multiple games until I find a galaxy that looks like a good match for my game. In EU4, I'll flail through the opening scenarios, figure out what dangers to be scared of and what opportunities to work for, and likely restart a few times until I feel like I can get the game off on a good foot.

In addition to the religion, I also realized that the in-game Missions I was seeing didn't match up with what I saw on the wiki. After some searching, I realized that this is because the most recent DLC "Winds of Change" added new content for Bohemia, including another revamp of their mission tree. This is a relatively recent change, I think starting with "Lions of the North", where there are branching missions available. For Bohemia, for example, you can either follow a Catholic-themed path of religious missions or a Hussite-themed one. While traditionally the missions have been based on actual historical events or attempts, Paradox is increasingly playing with "What if?" scenarios that are fleshed out by the game (and not just by the player).

The community consensus seems to be that EU4 is probably nearing its end and EU5 can't be too far off. The game is over 11 years old now, the oldest in this portfolio. Every major and most minor nations have received DLC content, and, as some mildly annoyed commenters have commented, quite a few nations have received multiple rounds: Bohemia had already gotten a significant overhaul in Emperor, did it really "need" more updates?

As I eventually learned (once I was too far into my game to feel good about a restart) it's even worse than that. After getting further down the Hussite mission tree I unlocked a religious Aspect of Faith that costs 200 Church Power and lets you declare war on any neighboring heretic religion (like the "Deus Vult" casus belli from Religious Ideas). But it showed up with an "X" on my screen, and didn't seem to actually unlock the ability. After yet more research, I learned that this ability is actually locked behind the Domination DLC, one of the few that I don't actually own. Even if I were to buy it now, I couldn't continue this Ironman save and earn achievements. Most annoyingly, Bohemia isn't mentioned anywhere on the product page for Domination, so it isn't even like I failed in my research. I found myself missing the icons that Stellaris shows when you're starting a game that suggest DLC which would augment the specific species you're playing at; seeing something like that here before starting the Bohemia game would have been really helpful.

Going back to the campaign: in the one I ended up rolling with, I had my missionary just chill for a few years. After a couple of decisions, we officially converted to Hussite and I set about converting my provinces.

 

I do really like the mission tree in EU4, it gives some great medium-term goals to work towards. Some of mine were diplomatic: you start off with two vassals to the east, and have some missions that encourage integrating them. The bigger and more challenging ones have to do with enforcing Personal Unions over Poland and Hungary. I knew that I'd need big allies for this, so I cozied up to Muscovy and the Ottomans. This turned out to not be very helpful, as they were constantly deep in debt and unwilling to heed my call to arms.

While waiting for my backup to become available, I turned towards some more traditional expansion. In my Portugal game, one of the most important things was controlling Centers of Trade so you could dominate a trade node and get the income from it. Bohemia is mostly in the Saxony trade node. Prague itself is a big center of trade, and there were a few other ones within striking distance. I fought some wars against, hm, I think Brandenberg and Saxony and one other country to take some more. This made me: extremely unpopular! Besides the massive Aggressive Expansion, you also get huge relational maluses from holding "unlawful territory", which seems to happen basically any time you conquer from another state in the HRE. There are a few ways to avoid this but they aren't simple: disband the HRE, become the Emperor, or ally the Emperor. Despite only taking a grand total of maybe 4 provinces I was looking at like 70 years' worth of negative opinion! It sounds like the recommended/preferred way of expanding with the HRE is to instead vassalize your opponents and eventually integrate them, which I guess is more historically accurate. In my case, though, I specifically wanted those provinces now to juice my economy.

Dealing with Austria has been pretty fun. In my first attempt I allied with them, but in this game we started as mutual rivals, which works well for an early mission you have to Humiliate Austria. That was actually the first thing I did in my last couple of games: get some allies together, declare war on them, and get them to concede defeat. This is a great start to the Bohemia game as it gets your Power Projection way up early on and weakens a potentially dangerous neighbor, plus you don't need to take any provinces (at least for this mission) so you don't need to worry about any Aggressive Expansion or Unlawful Territory.

I'm not sure if it was a result of this, but Austria also lost the Emperorship in this game, which has been great; we've had a few Emperors since then and, despite Austria being by far the strongest Catholic country in the HRE, they haven't been invited back in. Austria isn't an Elector, but so far none of the other Emperors have been Electors either. I have at least some influence in this, as I'll back whichever non-Austrian candidate has the most support; but by this point nobody is backing Austria. I wonder if they just lost a ton of Prestige in that war or if some other mechanic is at play.

Back to the east: my plan had been to get Muscovy to help me take Poland/Lithuania and have the Ottomans help me with Hungary. I'd been currying favors for decades and had around 80 favors with each of them. Muscovy never did help, but the Ottomans ended up pitching in for both wars. The "Restoration of Union" casus belli has a fixed warscore requirement, so it's doable regardless of how large the target is; but it's a high warscore, so these are long and grinding wars.

 

They also make you very unpopular. I gulped when I saw the Aggressive Expansion warnings: basically everyone in central Europe would be furious at me. And, after taking Hungary, even furiouser.

My economy was doing pretty well by this point, with some decent trade supplementing my already-high production income, and I opted to become Defender of the Faith. I'd convinced my vassals and now my Personal Unions to follow the Hussite faith, so this came with some really nice bonuses like steady decreases to War Weariness even in wartime, increased missionary effectiveness, and extra prestige.

That aggressive expansion is no joke, though. In my Portugal game I'd done a good job at keeping it at bay: alternating conquests between different geographic areas and religions so it would decay before becoming too big of a problem, and by the point it did become a possibility, I had become so powerful that nobody dared attack me. I think the only time I saw coalitions form in that game was when I was occupied with war against massive opponents like the Ming Dynasty; as soon as the war ended, the coalition would dissolve.

 

In this game, though, I had been basically spitting in the face of European Catholicism for the last 50 years, and they were fed up with me. The coalition exploded in size, and I knew that (Ralph Wiggum voice) I'm in danger. The singular large powers like Castile, France and England were too far away to be affected, but the sheer number of princedoms with like 7k soldiers each was dwarfing even my Bohemian-Polish-Lithuanian-Hungarian family.

I knew from reading the wiki that I should declare on the coalition rather than wait for them to declare on me, since the Coalition Casus Belli has an additional -30 penalty to accepting peace. I also knew that I didn't have any realistic hope of winning this war. My goal was to fire it, make peace on the least painful terms, and use the long truce time to repair relations and prevent the coalition from re-forming.

I ended up declaring on the Teutonic Order, a coalition member that was sandwiched between me and Poland. Everyone I was worried about was on my western border, and by taking a Teutonic province early I could get ticking warscore to partially offset the many penalties I was looking at. This ended up working out okay, about as well as I expected: my fully-garrisoned forts were able to hold out for a while as we defeated the few coalition members in the heartland, won a few minor skirmishes around the periphery, and, after a year or two, came to the table.

Another benefit of having the Teutonic Order be the target was that it was mostly their concerns I had to worry about: a Germanic target would have wanted back Saxony or another important province of mine, but in this case, I could cede my partner Poland's land. I spent some time here, picking provinces that didn't have a lot of Trade Power and weren't coastal, and ended up filling in war score with some ducats. In EU4, unlike in say Civilization, losing a war usually isn't a big deal. In this case, Poland already had cores on all the provinces I was surrendering, so I knew that once our truce was up I would be able to win them back at a fraction of the cost.

So, that was exciting, and a bit of a relief. I definitely took it easy for a while after this, letting my aggressive expansion and unlawful territory tick down and my manpower and ducats tick up. One unexpected bummer, which I didn't realize for a couple of years, was that I had lost my "Defender of the Faith" title: apparently you lose this if you lose any war, not just a war where you're called in to defend your brothers in faith. So that was 500 ducats down the drain. Even when I had the money to get it back, I shied away from it: by now it was the late 1400s, the Reformation was probably coming up soon, and as I was planning to switch to Protestant it probably didn't make sense to be the Hussite Defender of Faith for only a few decades.

 

During this "down time", though, I achieved my biggest territorial expansion of the game to date. Earlier on, I had managed to win the Burgundian Inheritance, one of the most significant events of the early game. Despite being different faiths, I had befriended Duke Charles and allied with him, so once he passed, his daughter Marie entered into a personal union with us. The HRE demanded releasing the lowlands; by this time the Emperorship had passed to some podunk prince, and I happily said "No" and fought to keep all the territory. Eventually Marie passed as well and the Burgundian lands all became Bohemian.

 

This wasn't part of my initial plan for the game, and definitely complicates a lot of things. Burgundy is obviously not contiguous with Bohemia, so I can't move my troops between them without 4-5 military access agreements with minor Germanic states. The provinces are all Catholic and of different cultures. Still, it's a big net benefit. You get free full cores on all of these lands, so it's a huge boost to manpower, tax and overall income. I still need to figure out what to do about trade. They participate in the English Channel (one of three terminal trade nodes) and Bordeaux; I'm currently pushing trade upstream but I know that's very inefficient. Over the very long term it might make sense to collect trade in the English Channel, but I don't have nearly enough trade power there yet, and would need to push my main Saxony power through some intermediate nodes where I have zero power. If this wasn't Ironman I would experiment with using my merchants to collect from multiple nodes instead of steering to Saxony and see how it compares. Heck, maybe I'll just try that anyways, I guess I'd only need to compare a couple of months.

 

 

The current situation I'm dealing with is the Lowlands Revolt. In most games the Netherlands emerge around this time, and I'm fighting really hard to keep that from happening. It's a lot harder than normal rebel suppression: in addition to the mechanics of the +10 local unrest, you get periodic events that just straight-up spawn a large rebel army in a Low Countries province. So basically I'll need to babysit this area for the next 20 years, which in turn means that my Balkan ambitions will probably be on hold for a while.

But that's fine. The Reformation did fire. I knew that there would be an event to convert from Hussite to Protestant, but I wasn't sure if it would convert every province or not. It turns out that it does, yay: or at least every province in your border. I had enforced religion on a few other nations over the years and almost all of them converted as well, except for The Palatinate which has remained Hussite. So we've got a nice head start on the Reformation.

 

In this game, the Reformation started southwest of Denmark, and so far the Centers of Reformation have mostly been along the North Sea and Baltic coastlines. I'm killing time while babysitting rebellions by declaring wars on small states and forcing them to become Protestant. It's pretty fun! Helpful too - apparently switching religions drops Prestige by 100 (!!!), so I was deeply negative for a while, and these wars are helping it to come back up.

It's also been a nice way to mess with the Catholic majors - they've started taking Defender of the Faith, so I'll like to declare a war on a small country far away, occupy it to get to -99 war enthusiasm, force religion on them (plus war reparations, ducats, and whatever else I can prestigiously demand), and take away the title from the Catholic Defender. This has been especially funny against Portugal, as they have to walk all the way across Europe and can't even get there before the war is done. Once that war is over, the next one won't have a Catholic Defender, so I can pick a larger target or one with more allies and take my time separate-peacing all of them.

Let's see, I think those are the major developments so far! My current plan is to keep doing this while the Lowlands Revolt is in place, hopefully getting together a lot more friends and prestige. Then I might finally take the Mission to subjugate Brandenberg and Saxony, since my Aggressive Expansion is mostly gone. Hungary is a bit of a problem: my rivals England, France, Castile and Muscovy are all supporting rebels there, so I can't lower their Liberty Desire. I'm hoping to eventually inherit them, but need to read up on the mechanics for that, they may just be too large. In any case, I want to go further down that tree for the "defend against the Turk" missions to reclaim the Balkans. I've already lined up Venice and the Mamluks as allies; the Ottomans are big but haven't fully blobbed yet so I think this will be my best chance.